IGIST – The first ever immersive digital reading experience

The Cats Whiskers? Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure Review

We recently had the pleasure of playing Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure, the charming wit and quirky sense of humour really bring the game into a world of its own. My personal favourite aspect is the talking cat, I mean I’d have endless hours of fun if any of my kitties could talk, then again once they had learnt the word ‘food’ I’d probably have gone insane… Anyway.

Developed by Stuck In AtticGibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure is a traditional point-and-click style adventure game set in the dark town of Darkham. I am not a massive fan of point-and-click games but the overall tone of the game is dark with a humorous twist, which pretty much speaks to my soul!

Our adventure starts as you play as the dark detective Don R Ketype, armed with his broody temperament and his beige trenchcoat, he heads in search of the ‘Necronomicon’ (a book of spells, the occult). He heads to the library in Darkham and comes across another main character, Buzz Kerwan a librarian, asking him for information about the book, which he has no information about. Suddenly there is an explosion which results in the kidnapping of Don, and Buzz finding the book, which had been under his nose the whole time. Although this seems like a very quick turn of events, there is a lot of clicking and a number of options to explore before getting to the end result.

Buzz goes home to his little apartment with the book and reads it (abracadabra… talking cat!). He turns his originally named cat ‘Kitteh’ into a walking, talking miracle, yet the cat is not very pleased with her newfound talent. Despite her general unhappiness, our little feline friend is often of use throughout the game. Kitteh is probably my favourite character, not just because I love cats, like all cats, every cat, even the mean ones, but because she is purely hilarious, direct and debonair in her approach to the general adventure. The mission is set at this point to reversing Kittehs ability and rescuing the good old detective. This sets up the themes of the game. At this point, I was intrigued to carry on playing and fully explore the game, mainly to find out why this book existed and why it was in that library, and why Ketype wanted it… Mysteryyyyy.

From here I found the story quite complicated in that the story is slightly hard to follow, with the bare bones of exciting ideas being there but they didn’t flow well together. As the beginning started off well I lost the general plot of the rest of the game which kinda dropped my interest, particularly with the exhaustion of clicking the characters dialogue which is a large factor of the game throughout.

For those gamers who prefer a fast pace advancement and bore with long levels and dialogue, this probably won’t be your cup of tea, I mean I personally love story-based games but I found this too long-winded and frustrating at times even though the game itself is fairly short, but I persevered purely due to the humourous experience along the way.

Overall my first impression of the game was good, but I dunno whether it’s just my lack of patience or slow progression of the game, I found it after a while not very entertaining. Hats off to the creators though for the dialogue and animation alone, they managed to create a creepy yet witty atmosphere which was refreshing.

80%

The TL;DR:

Witty, debonair approach to a mysterious adventure;

Talking cat – always fun;

Long-winded puzzle game with a partly confusing story;

If you love dark and humorous fun Gibbous is the one for you.

Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure is developed by Transylvanian based indie studio Stuck In Attic, and is available to download now. Find out more about the game and where you can purchase it from the official website, which you can reach by clicking HERE. You can also check out more of our latest reviews by clicking HERE.

About The Author

In the words of Paramore; "for a pessimist, I'm pretty optimistic"…. I don’t follow recipes but I like to dabble…. I like cats and long hot baths but not at the same time, fluent in English which is important cause; I cannot talk to my cats in their language, but I can moan on about it sat on my wizard cat bedding in my cat pyjamas (no I'm not weird, you’ve got the problem, not me). All joking aside I am a masters graduate in psychology (no I can’t read your min…., oh wait did I just? Oh never mind), so I am big into psychological, story-based and horror video games (mainly the real-life choice type... oh chaos theory you beautiful thing). I also spend my weekends vigorously ripping my hair out over the football and taking adorbs photos of my kitty cats.